Thought things from the head of a British teenager who has uncertain but very definitely lefty and libertarian (not in the economic sense) views.

21 Apr 2011

I'm so confiscating my grandparents' Daily Mail...

EDIT (02/11/2012): In hindsight, I don't feel like I should have posted this. Gonna leave this up though since I only Orwell stuff if I have really good reasons to - ultimately pretending it never happened seems at the very least odd to my moral compass. Also, none of the links in this work anymore since itsyotsy got shut down and I really cannot be bothered to track them down again.

You know the stereotype of old people being conservatives of both the big 'C' and small 'c' types? Well I think my paternal grandparents may well conform to that (I think my dad is also a Tory). Well, my grandmother certainly does, at least, going off a conversation I had with her yesterday. In a bullet point list, here are a few views she expressed. Whilst reading this I ask you to bear in mind that she's actually British Chinese (I think her father was a second-generation Chinese immigrant) :

'Enoch Powell was right when he said he didn't want all of those coming in here' I'm paraphrasing slightly, but the first part is what my grandmother said word for word.

Schools should bring back Christian assemblies as they teach people morals (I didn't even realise she was a practising Christian).

We'll soon be majority non-white-British.

The Muslims will be taking over with their Diwali and what have-you (yes, Muslims, I actually face-palmed at this, I feel quite bad as this was my Grandma I was talking to, I did point out the mistake).

We shouldn't bail-out <insert other country here> as there's no money left (note: I agree with her, kind of, but more due to me thinking that the imposing of economic shock therapy measures on 'bailed-out' countries is wrong,)

There was also the general implicit feeling that this was Labour's fault (my grandfather at least has never voted Labour, excluding in 2005 (I'm inferring this based off a reference to Gordon Brown)).

By way of reference, here's a sampling of what comes up on a search for 'immigration 2011' on the site- all links go direct to the website to istyosty, for best effects read the comments*:

Gee, I wonder where my grandma got her views from. And you know what the terrifying thing is? MailOnline is the second largest English language news website in the world. It had 39.6 million readers in March, and chances are not all of them were there to mock it. It is the largest news site in Britain. Regarding the dead-tree copies, according to the Wikipedia, the Daily Mail has a circulation of 2.1million. And this is the sort of stuff they're reading (okay, this and a ton of shallow show business stuff), yeah, likewise, some people take Melanie Phillips seriously. Hell, I think that I used to take Melanie Phillips seriously in my Daily-Mail reading days (I dismissed Littlejohn as being less funny than Clarkson though, and my maternal grandma put me off Jan Moir). Although, in the Mail's defence, they did dedicate 1/3rd of a page to this story concerning 'Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs' standing up for the electrician I mentioned earlier (I did read out the headline to my Grandma...), it's no wonder the far-right are so popular (even if the Mail does pretend to not support them), when we have a media (I've picked on the Mail as I have the most experience with it) which makes it sound like we're under attack from 'Muslamic rape gangs'.

*In order to make sure the results were recent, I put '2011' in. I can't remember the name of the Daily Mail proxy, and I'm only quoting the headlines here - the actual story may show them to be misleading (which probably helps my point here). All headlines come from the articles themselves (there are two headlines visible sometimes) as I'm assuming these were the ones they were printed under. The 'other headline' as it were is visible in the URL the header of the page. I used Google to find them by doing a 'this site only' search, since I couldn't find MailOnline's search function. The results received using this may be different and more positive (or negative, the Mail could just about conceivably be worse than this).,